Body Kintsugi
Published on 4. October 2022
Book
Paperback/Softback
978-1-908670-73-1 (ISBN)
Description
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with liquid gold, to highlight and celebrate an object's past. In this powerful and personal novella, Senka Maric uses the concept of kintsugi to interrogate ideas of illness, survival and recovery.
Two months after her husband packs his bags and leaves the family home, the narrator finds a lump in her armpit. It's a discovery she's been dreading ever since her mother's breast cancer diagnosis sixteen years earlier, and one that will change her body forever. Through diagnosis, chemotherapy, and surgery, the narrator returns to those moments of her girlhood when she learnt to be ashamed of her sexuality and estranged from her body - the same body that now threatens to fall apart during her illness. Laced with a drive for life, sensuality and pleasure, Body Kintsugi is an intimate and optimistic book about a woman's relationship with her body as it breaks and is put back together.
Two months after her husband packs his bags and leaves the family home, the narrator finds a lump in her armpit. It's a discovery she's been dreading ever since her mother's breast cancer diagnosis sixteen years earlier, and one that will change her body forever. Through diagnosis, chemotherapy, and surgery, the narrator returns to those moments of her girlhood when she learnt to be ashamed of her sexuality and estranged from her body - the same body that now threatens to fall apart during her illness. Laced with a drive for life, sensuality and pleasure, Body Kintsugi is an intimate and optimistic book about a woman's relationship with her body as it breaks and is put back together.
Reviews / Votes
'A raw and moving book, written in exquisite, taut prose, which explores illness and healing through an inventive, kaleidoscopic narrative.' Sam Mills, author of Chauvo-Feminism and The Fragments of My Father; 'As a revelatory account of illness, the novel stands alongside Anne Boyer and Audre Lorde, while the sensuous intelligence of the prose, in Celia Hawkesworth's astonishing translation, reminded me of Virginia Woolf. It's a wonderful book.' Caleb Klaces, author of Fatherhood; 'A brave book written from personal experience that offers us much-needed hope in the victory of life over death' Faruk Sehic, author of Under Pressure and Quiet Flows the Una; 'The writing is intimate - patient, sensory, murky - a portrait of consciousness under duress.' Stacy Mattingly, Literary Hub; 'Nobody has written about the female body in our language like Senka Maric.' Sasa Dragojlo, Noizz; 'Gentle and combative, sad but not at all pathetic, it is an unusually strong narrative about weakness.' Vladislava Gordic Petkovic, Bosnian scholarMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 194 mm
Width: 125 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
165 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-908670-73-1 (9781908670731)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Persons
Senka Maric was born in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1972. She is a writer and editor and is the author of three poetry collections and two novels. She is also the editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine Strane. Her works have been translated into Spanish, Russian, German, Hungarian and Slovenian. Body Kintsugi, which won the prestigious Mesa Selimovic Prize, is her first book to be translated into English.